Room or building cooling units of innumerable variation are well known in the industry, but there is always a need for an improved efficiency in the system to reduce the consumption of energy while still achieving the desired results. This invention is concerned with improving the efficiency of conventional heating and/or cooling systems by the application of some unique technology. The intent is to provide zones at the exterior building walls having substantially equal temperatures (on all sides of the building) and thus minimize the solar effect on the building interior.
Although the invention herein did not result from a knowledge of the patent to Wild, U.S. Pat. No. 3,793,931, dated Feb. 26, 1974, it would have to be considered an improvement over the Wild disclosure. The disclosure of Wild includes passing air from inside an air conditioned room into an enclosure bounded by double window panes of a conventional window. The air is calculated to flow from the room downward into the space between the window panes to about floor level where the air is exhausted to the outside. Mounted between the window panes is an adjustable heat and light deflecting collection of slats, an example of which is the conventional Venetian blind.
To understand the improvement desclosed herein it can probably be best illustrated by considering the progress of the sun in its traverse of the sky during the daylight hours and its effect on a building being cooled. Rooms within the building are conventionally cooled by some type of air handling apparatus but this fact bears no direct relationship to the inventive concept herein, although the cool air used by the room cooling system could also be used in the wall cooling system (which is part of the inventive concept). The wall cooling system includes cooled (or heated) air which is pumped between the double panes of the exterior windows of the building. This will be explained in more detail subsequently. But, to understand the reason for what is being done consider for example, the position of the sun in the early morning after the building is occupied. The interior spaces adjacent to the exterior walls on the east and south side of the building will be heated due to the warm up of the exterior walls as the result of the impingement of the sun, thus creating a transmission of heat energy from the sun's rays to the interior spaces. The interior spaces will further be heated as a result of the direct rays of the sun entering the windows on these sides of the building. At the same time, at the north and west sides of the building, there will be no major contribution of heat from the sun's rays to the internal spaces. Consequently, there is a need for greater heat removal at this particular time of day from the south and east sides of the building than there is from the north and west sides in order to maintain rather stable space temperatures within the building.
As the earth rotates through the day into afternoon, the sun's rays are impinged on the south and west walls of the building, while the north and east walls are in shadow. In this instance, the south and west walls will require more heat to be removed than will the shadowed sides. In fact, one could easily have an instance where cooling would be required on one or two sides of the building and heating would be required on the shadowed sides due primarily to the effect of the sun's rays impinged on certain surfaces of the building. The heat removal requirement will vary as the sun moves through its path during the day, thus causing a change in building conditions as it moves across the sky from morning to evening.
This invention has devised a mechanism for temperature control by the technique of measuring the temperature of the exit air from the double paned windows and controlling the volume of cooled or heated air conducted through each window unit in response to the measured temperature of the exiting air which will be in direct relationship to the quantity of energy dissipated by the sun's rays.